Ringfort (Rath), Dungeel, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Between the farmyard and the field boundary near the Laune River in County Kerry, an early medieval ringfort has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it.
One half of this roughly thirty-metre circular enclosure, a rath, is now occupied by an abandoned vernacular house; the other survives as a curving arc of earthen bank, its inner face patched with modern concrete blocks and its outer side reinforced with recent drystone walling. A rath is a type of enclosed farmstead, typically dating from the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one sits on the western side of a small ridge, about two hundred and fifty metres from the Laune River, and the tension between its ancient form and its accumulated later uses gives it a particular quality of quiet incongruity.
By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1846, the enclosure was still legible as a complete circular form on the six-inch sheet. Fifty years later, the 1895 revision tells a different story: only the eastern half is marked, the western portion already lost to whatever structures had grown up within it. The Ordnance Survey Name Books from the 1840s record a site identified as Doongeel Fort, situated towards the south of the townland, with a note that a house had already been erected on it at that time. This appears to be the same site, which means the process of domestic encroachment was already well under way before the first modern maps were even drawn. The surviving bank, measuring around four and a half metres wide and just under a metre in height on the exterior, runs to the north-northeast, skirted by a lane on one side and pressed close by farmyard activity on the other.